Stay on target

Late last night, the gaming world was brought together when superstar rapper Drake played Fortnite with streamer Ninja on Twitch. Well, everyone except me. I haven’t actively listened to pop music for about 20 years, so I only know about Drake because of the memes on Twitter. And despite being a qualified gaming journalist, I legit had no idea who this Ninja guy was. I stream on Twitch, but I still do not fully understand the concept of watching someone play games. As I often do when things like this happen, I was left feeling like an old man.

So how did this all go down? Apparently, this had been in the works for months (according to the BBC). Drake is a fan of Fortnite and often plays the game to relax after recording sessions. The rapper is also a fan of Ninja, who regularly streams Fortnite on Twitch. Drake plays Fortnite on PS4 and Ninja plays on PC. Thanks to the newly introduced crossplay feature, the two were able to play with one another. As it turns out, this unique collaboration resulted in one of Twitch’s biggest streams yet.

According to Polygon, the stream reached 635,000 concurrent views. That’s short of the all-time record held by ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018 with over 1.1 million concurrent viewers. Still, 635k is nothing to sneeze at. Thanks to the stream, Ninja gained 90,000 new followers on Twitch. The streamer also ended up making $250,000 in revenue off the stream. Even Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster joined the stream.

I didn’t watch the stream myself since it was late at night, but I did toss out these tweets before bed. As always, my feelings are best summed up by quoting The Simpsons.

So Drake (a rapper I don’t know a single song from) and some Twitch streamer I don’t know about is the biggest thing going on tonight on Twitter? I don’t get it. pic.twitter.com/16YpNIhGr2

No one batted an eye when I admitted to not knowing who Ninja was. However, nearly everyone was shocked I didn’t know about Drake. I mean… I know who Drake is. He’s the rapper who dances funny and has countless memes associated with him. It’s just that if you were to play me a song from him, I’d have no idea it was him. I am perfectly comfortable being the old man of the internet.

Despite my confusion over the whole thing, I’m happy that this event brought joy to people. There’s a lot of (stupid) divisions in gaming, so it’s nice when something brings the community together. Will we see something like this happen again? Given the numbers this stream pulled in, you can bet your ass it will. When it does, I’ll be ready with this all-too-appropriate video.